Richard Dawkins’ Islam Problem and Ours

Over the last few days, militant atheist author Professsor Richard Dawkins has caused an uproar with a Tweet that transcended the bounds of Twitter and made it into the (mostly British) mainstream media.

Dawkins tweeted: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

I had once considered tweeting something similar — that the inventions of Jewish doctors had saved more Islamic lives than all the imams in history put together — but decided to refrain for fear of what happened to Dawkins, who has been savaged by the bien pensants.

Writer and Independent columnist Owen Jones responded: “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.

Ah, but is it “bigotry” when you are factual? And Dawkins, as many will remember, has also attacked Christianity with great disdain many times over. Needless to say, however, he never got such pushback.

Bashing Christianity is fair game but bashing Islam is not. For Dawkins or just about anybody else.

Never mind that these days so much more murder and mayhem is committed in the name of Islam than Christianity, we’re not supposed to mention that out loud — not even if our name is Dawkins.

This isn’t just political correctness. In the United States, where jihadist mass murderer Major Hasan is on trial for “workplace violence,” it has become government policy.

But behind closed doors, almost nobody believes this nonsensical rhetoric. Just as there are no atheists is foxholes (well, Richard Dawkins excepted perhaps), no one’s “politically correct” getting on airplanes (we’re all a bit more nervous if some of the passengers look Islamic) or even, post Boston Marathon, attending sporting events.

We’re just not supposed to talk about it.

Richard Dawkins, however, is being excoriated for pointing out the obvious. These days the Islamic world has a giant problem — they’ve been moving backwards for hundreds of years while the rest of the world moves forward (although rather fitfully). And they’re visiting that problem on all of us.

Dawkins’ sin that has his opponents aflutter isn’t lying about this. It’s telling the truth about it.

He may have impulse-control issues — Twitter is one of the epicenters of that — but he’s no more a bigot than most of us. We all think that way, even many of his critics. We just shut up about it.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Well, it’s not simple, but our public dishonesty complicates matters. It also amounts to infantilizing Muslims — basically a racist policy. They are infants who cannot take criticism. (Hillary Clinton’s monumentally hypocritical apology for the Nakoula Nakoula video is a particularly wretched example of this behavior.)

The least you can say for Dawkins is that, unlike Hillary, he doesn’t treat Muslims like children.

How much of the so-called Muslim achievement was really just the result of their coerced conversion or enslavement of the Christian Byzantines, the Levantine Jews, and others of different faiths such as Persians and Indians, all of whom had much more technologically, intellectually, and economically advanced cultures than the barbarians from the Arabian desert.

Rather than doing some good things in the so-called Dark Ages, I think there is a much better argument that the Muslims caused the Dark Ages. Muslim piracy and slaveing essentially cut Europe off from Mediterranean trade and the goods, intellectual property, and technology of the Eastern Roman Empire and its successors and from the Orient. Marco Polo's trip to the Orient wasn't a mission of discovery; the Silk Road was long known, though all but forgotten by his time, and the Byzantines had even imported silkworms and had a thriving silk industry that didn't rely on trade on the vulnerable trade routes to the Orient. The Visigoths who conquered Roman Africa didn't trash it, they lived on it. In doing so they deprived Rome of the revenue from taxation and Rome couldn't afford to buy resources from Africa, pay or provide tax relief to dispossessed Roman African citizens, and maintain order with the Legions and governmental apparatus. Hence the dissolution of the Western Empire. The "barbarians" of Europe for the most part didn't want to destroy Roman wealth, they wanted it for themselves and other than the immediate casualties of conflict, most settled right in to an essentially Roman way of life. The desert herders trashed the fertile farmlands of Roman Africa and virtually everywhere else they conquered. I think it is foolish multiculturalism to credit Muslims with any real accomlishment; they have been a detriment to civilization - period.

When we are afraid to tell the truth, we became our own prisoner. And this is how the collectivist - from Islam to Marxism - ideologies reigns over the populous. By scaring you to submission.History shows, this tactic eventually back fires at the cost of human lives and suffering. The sad part of this is that humans keep repeating the act over and over again.

Modern leftist/progressive thinking insists that truth is subject to context, and that reality is a matter of interpretation, and, above all, everything is relative.. Islamic honor killing is not murder, but a quaint cultural aside. Clitoral mutilation is a benign religious rite of passage. The torture, and murder of civilians merely a legitimate alternative mode of social protest a la Bill Ayers, for instance . And so on. However this phenomenon is not confined to the Lefts' attitude re the Islamic world; the same mindset is applied to the problem of Black murder rates, abortion/genocide, homosexuality/HIV, the definition of marriage, and the concept of science as a matter of consensus. Obama represents the epitome of the right thinking progressive, and of course, his policies vis a vis the Muslim world reflect this; utter catastrophe.

"Never mind that these days so much more murder and mayhem is committed in the name of Islam than Christianity"What do you mean by "these days"?There has never been a time in history when Christianity committed more murder and mayhem than islam.

Barbarians can be quaint like the loin cloth wearing tribes of the Amazon, but when there are millions of them that hold murderous hatred in their hearts that's quite a different matter. A large number of Muslims are barbarians. I know followers of Dawkins hate Christians with the force of a thousand exploding suns, but they don't have to worry about getting their head chopped off by one. As to the supposed Muslim scientific achievements the claim is laughable. Show us the historical data that proves these claims. They can't, so they just rattle their head chopping knives and condemn people to death for insulting Islam. And we cower to these frauds? I'd tell these savages that the next attack will be met with a retaliation that will send them further back to the Stone Age than they already are.

Well, it is not the first time Dawkins has been proved wrong, and it is maybe only the exception that proves the rule, but Obama, Jr. claims a Muslim sire and name, and had a Muslim step-dad for sure, and damned if he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Palestinians and Israelis haven't completely exterminated each other yet for which, I am sure, Hillary and John Kerry could claim equal credit on Obama's watch, when, like magic, American boots, left a quiescent Iraq after the Bush Surge which Obama voted against. So who is to say Obama as a Muslim did not earn his Peace Prize. I'm just saying. But I guess Dawkins couldn't fit all that into his Tweet. There haven't been so many Middle East ironies since Richard Lionheart got kidnapped on his way back from getting his nose tweaked by Saladin which in one way or another gave us the Magna Carta though no Nobel Prizes.

When Dawkins was referring to Nobel prizes I suspect he was referring to the prizes for real things, like science or medicine, not the mostly BS Nobel Peace Prize. Yes Obama, a half muslim, got the Nobel peace prize, for doing absolutely nothing, and even Yasser Arafat got it, for signing a treaty with Israel that he subsequently violated. But Dawkins is essentially correct that since the middle ages Islam has contributed very little positives to human culture, in relation to their numbers, while contributing to an enormous amount of violence and terror.

I'm an atheist, as well. Am I prejudiced toward Muslims? Well, heck, it's hard not to be prejudiced toward a culture of murder and hate now, isn't it. Sure, they can call me a bigot, but I say that my prejudice is justified, simply because I know they would like to kill me just for believing the way I do, while a Christian will simply try to talk me into going to church. In comparison, I don't even see how other atheists can get so annoyed with well meaning Christians trying to do what they think is saving our souls, while there are Muslims out there who would kill us for simply existing.

I think you meant to say that you are prejudiced AGAINST Muslims, not toward them.

But even that is incorrect. The term, "prejudice" implies a judgement formed on the basis of superficial and (usually) irrelevant data, such as skin color or the like, and thus is an unreasoned and invalid judgement.

In contrast, yours is a REASONED judgement, based on a long history of actions, a track record, and a sufficient knowledge of the doctrines from which those actions flow.

Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages It's religious thinkers have had a great deal of difficulty in reconciling science and Islam, because the Koran is written in such a way as to preclude it. Many ulama have tried to reconcile the two, but it has resulted in an unfinished patchwork. That is the main reason that Islam remains close to its original world of superstition. Christianity was flexible enough to accommodate the Enlightenment, Islam was not.

Roger Simon ought to do more research, before cheering on any critic of Islam. To the likes of Dawkins, there is no difference between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. I am no fan of religion at all, but Dawkins is an odious moral and cultural relativist, then again he is a liberal.

Plus is Simon oblivious of Dawkins's anti-Israelism? Appears so. All Dawkins's criticisms of Islam go out the window when it comes to the Palestinians and their conflict with the Jews, then it's a case of the poor innocent Muslims in Dawkins's book. Dawkins echoes and parrots the fashionable anti-Israel and yes anti-Semitic sentiments of the British intellectual Left when it comes to the Muslim Arab-Israel conflict. So Dawkins is simply full of it. He tries to have it both ways. Dawkins has added his name to at least one anti-Israel petition and his commentary on the all-powerful Jewish lobby in the US is simply odious.

Whenever any Leftist has anything unPC to say about Islam, the response should be to check a little deeper, go below the surface appearance; and not just cheer on said Leftist in autonomic fashion.

Obama recently gave a press conference. He told his usual number of lies, along with an extremely ugly, malicious, demonizing charge hurled at Republicans (which I will not repeat). Did anyone in the Press stand up to this lying tyrant? No. They all acquiesce to his lies. Now this is nothing new -- it's been going on for a long, long time. Liars are praised and become presidents. Meanwhile, people who fight for the truth are ostracized, belittled, defamed, called names. This dust-up between Dawkins and his irate twitter followers who resent his truthful statement is like a microcosm...ironically, even their former "hero" can suddenly be dumped if he refuses to mouth their propaganda. I think it's breathtaking just how far society is collapsing (have the masses lost the ability to discern truth from fiction? I read a text by Louis Jacobs, and one chapter was devoted to the value of truth -- he repeated that familiar Talmud quote: "The seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth", and then he explained what he thought this means. I find myself re-reading this chapter over and over (so many insights).

The subject of this article is the hypocrisy of the PC crowd and their inability to accept facts without screaming racism. Interesting information about Dawkins, but it has nothing to do with the subject and argument of this article and should neither subtract nor add to its premise.

'Angry little punk [and lots more amateur insults]' -- hardly. Dawkins is typical of the kind of vain limey academic who stays well away from reality. Very bright, and an adept self-publicist, but emotionally on a par with a kid with a can of spray paint. Reading between the lines, Simon knows that, or at least suspects it.

As for his atheism, D hasn' t exactly recanted but he has acknowledged he's an agnostic. (Logical rigor or fear of Pascal's wager? -- dunno.). Believe his mini-Damascus moment came after Christopher Hitchens' death, which may not be a coincidence. Overall, D is a valuable form of fertilizer, in all senses.

More worrying is the torrent of clueless cut-and-paste invective coughed up here on this thread as a substitute for thought or action. There is plenty of room for shame. What have you done to honor the memories of those slaughtered at Fort Hood and to prevent a repetition? Major Hassan, like President Cardboard, is more a symptom than a cause. Whining your way to alienation accomplishes precisely zip. If you won't accept that, then you're part of the problem. Destroy political correctness first.

Dawkins was right, but only in the stopped clock, twice a day sense. Dawkins was just doing his standard anti-religion bigotry schtick. He's about as deep as Bill Maher on the subject of religion. They are both angry little punks who have never bothered to either study any religion, or even philosophy deeply, and who don't notice that atheism too is a faith, the most unfounded of all religious faiths. They are both like some crank whonhas never studied mathematics claiming that quantum physics is a bunch of bunk. Or someone who refuses to look through a microscope denying the existence of microbes.